Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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    New LabourHome, flashy Libertas

    A couple of interesting developments in online political campaigning in the last few days.

    LabourHome has finally had its long-needed rebuild and refresh – moving, hurrah!, to WordPress. But by the look of it, and I could be wrong on this, it’s running on normal WordPress, rather than MU (multi user). You’d have thought it would be an ideal candidate for MU, giving each user their own proper, customisable blog (plus the option to extend to a full-on social network via BuddyPress). Instead, it’s a single group blog, with a particularly large group of authors. It’ll be interesting to see how far it scales.

    Visually it’s satisfactory, if a little modest in its ambitions, with familiar/predictable fonts and screen furniture. Functionally though, it seems like a dramatic improvement on what went before, with a much greater sense of order to it all. (Particular credit due for importing so much backdated content, including comments even.) It seems to be a much better site for the move already; and as Alex Hilton seems to be hinting, it gives them a platform that’ll be much easier to extend.

    libertasadI’m also intrigued by something Libertas have put together: a ‘make your own ad‘ function. They’ve got a handful of templates, with space for you to put a personalised message, or upload a picture; the resulting advert is generated in Flash, for inclusion in their (highly visible, although not yet obviously effective) online push:

    Libertas is a new political party that seeks to put the people of Europe back in charge of the EU. In that spirit, we’re asking you to help spread the word by creating your very own ad for Libertas. We’ll then run it across the internet, along with thousands of others. It’s dead easy. And it’s a first.

    It’s not without its issues and limitations: there must be a risk of abuse of the service, and I wonder what the implications are as regards election legislation. Plus, frankly, the templates are a bit rubbish. But it’s a very interesting concept nonetheless; a logical ‘next step’ from the many unofficial Obama-inspired websites like obamicon. One for the bigger parties to consider?

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    Nick Clegg's off-the-shelf redesign

    NickClegg.com May09 500

    There’s a new look to NickClegg.com, ‘the official Leader’s site for the Liberal Democrats’, powered – as noted previously – by WordPress. And it isn’t yellow, not in the slightest. In fact, it took me quite a while even to spot the party’s bird logo, concealed in each instance behind signatures or other graphic elements.

    This isn’t like any Liberal Democrats web design you’ve seen before… because basically, it isn’t a LibDems web design. It’s an ‘out of the box’ installation of the (free) Revolution Office theme for WordPress… seen here in its raw form.

    Of course, on one level, this is another reminder of the power of WordPress. Redesigning your entire website is as simple as finding a theme you like, downloading it, and pressing the ‘activate’ button. A few minutes tweaking the settings, and you’re done. So quick, so easy, so cheap. Plus, depending on the theme author, a guarantee (of sorts) that your site will keep working, no matter what changes happen in forthcoming WordPress upgrades.

    But I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with ‘off the shelf’ design like this. As soon as I understood how, I stopped using third-party themes, and started coding my own. Several reasons for doing so, I think:

    • A need to understand what’s happening under the hood… in case something goes wrong, and you’re called on to fix it. I don’t think you can get that from ‘plug and play’ theming.
    • Something instinctive about branding. Your brand identity is meant to be a representation of you, what you do, and why you do it. Deep down, I don’t really believe it can be ‘you’ if you’re just pouring yourself into someone else’s mould. It can’t have soul unless it started from scratch.
    • Total customisability. No matter how good an off-the-shelf theme might be, I can’t believe it’ll cover every possible requirement a client might throw at you. So you’re going to end up getting your hands dirty with code anyway; and if it’s your own code in the first place, it should be much easier. (See point one.)
    • Fraud risk. Yes, you use off-the-shelf because it makes it much easier for you. But equally, it makes it easy – far too easy – for someone else to grab a ‘lookalike’ domain, download the same theme, and build (in effect) a ‘phishing’ site.

    (The only exception is the production of sites based on Steph’s Commentariat theme: as I’ve described before, I personally think it’s important – for now at least – that these sites look deliberately similar, to make a point about code re-use in HMG.)

    Maybe I’m being too precious about this. On low-budget, low-ambition projects, an off-the-shelf theme will probably be more, much more than adequate. You can have a website with top-notch functionality up and running in, let’s say, an hour. Client is happy, designer is off to the pub.

    Ultimately, I think it comes down to how you see your business. Companies make money by selling lots of something cheap, or a few of something expensive. You can churn out lots of identikit sites for lots of people: that’s a perfectly valid business model, albeit pretty intensive on the sales side. Alternatively, you can try to make each one special. Puffbox opted for the latter. And so far, we’re doing OK out of it.

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    WordPress in UK government: an informal audit

    I thought it was about time I compiled a list of all the UK (central) government web projects I know of, which use WordPress. Partly because I’m meeting some people during the week to talk about it; partly to start preparation for the session I’ve volunteered to give at July’s WordCamp UK. This is off the top of my head, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few obvious examples: please leave additions and amendments in the comments.

    I’m only looking for live sites: I know of several more projects ‘in the works’ (and am always keen to receive tipoffs!). I’ve noted those built on Steph’s open-source Commentariat theme with an asterisk.

    HEALTH

    DFID

    BIS

    BERR (now BIS)

    UKTI

    DIUS (now BIS)

    JUSTICE

    DEFRA

    SCOTLAND OFFICE

    WALES OFFICE

    CABINET OFFICE

    10 DOWNING STREET

    MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

    COI

    ORDNANCE SURVEY

    ROYAL NAVY

    LAW COMMISSION

    PARLIAMENT

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    Ordnance Survey's new approach

    ordsvystrategy

    Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working with Ordnance Survey to produce a WordPress version of their new business strategy, published today. As you’ll immediately spot, it’s another piece of work based on Steph Gray’s Commentariat theme, including some of the tweaks I did for BERR’s Low Carbon Strategy.

    As I write this, I’ve literally just pressed the ‘go’ button, so I haven’t even read the document yet myself, and can’t offer any opinion on it (yet). But I didn’t hide my disappointment at the unveiling of the OpenSpace project a year ago, and I’m told things have moved much further forward on that front at least. It hasn’t been enough to satisfy the Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign, though.

    I know this is a subject of considerable interest to the e-government / activist community, which probably covers most of you reading this. We’ve created a web-friendly platform for you to read what OS are proposing, and tell them what you think about it. What are you waiting for?

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    Don't get a feed, get a blog

    I didn’t write about Mash The State when I first heard about it, because the ambitions seemed embarrassingly modest: getting each council in the country to offer an RSS feed by Christmas. In 2009? – seriously?

    And then I note that, of the three e-government super-sites – Directgov, Businesslink, NHS Choices, annual budget approx £30m each – only the NHS site offers RSS feeds (and even then, only a few). Directgov has recently started offering its first RSS feed, but if you look at the source code, you’ll note that the URLs all begin with slashes. In other words, they aren’t valid RSS. Or in other less diplomatic words, they’re useless. If a guid isn’t globally unique, then it isn’t a guid. Still, at least they’re trying. Businesslink doesn’t seem to have anything in RSS. At all.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the web is racing ahead. I’m especially proud of the DFID Bloggers site in that regard: helpful as ever, WordPress offers pretty much every list available through the site as an RSS feed, if you know the right URL to call. Each category has an RSS feed. Each tag has an RSS feed. Each individual author has an RSS feed. Heck, you can even get search queries as RSS feeds: meaning, in effect, you can have a customised RSS feed of ‘every time that WordPress site mentions X’. All out of the box; at zero charge and zero effort. They just happen.

    RSS continues to delight me as a website designer and builder. Recent WordPress releases have added some extra – undocumented? – tricks: for example, if you can construct the right URL query string, you can get an RSS feeds of all items except those from a certain category. (Clue: ‘cat=-1’.) And it’s going to get even better imminently, with the inclusion of the brilliant SimplePie, for consuming RSS, into the next WordPress release.

    I’ve built entire sites like Real Help Now and onepolitics powered solely by RSS feeds from third-party sites. I’m even building a couple of WordPress sites now which will use their own internal RSS feeds to surface content, rather than me coding ‘proper’ PHP/SQL queries. It’s just easier. And when you’re doing something as an outsider because it’s easier than the ‘proper’ internal method, you know we’ve reached somewhere significant.

    The truth is, if your website still isn’t offering an RSS feed, you’re falling further and further behind the rest of the web, and you’re depriving yourself of the magic which eager geeks might bring to your content. But before you go spending money adding an RSS feed to, say, your press release pages – don’t. There’s a content management solution which is optimised for delivering text documents on a rolling basis, presented chronologically. You’re looking at it.

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    Matt Mullenweg to attend UK WordCamp

    wordcampuk-2009-graphicTickets have just gone on sale for this year’s second WordCamp UK. And if the promise of hearing me banging on about WordPress isn’t quite enough to tempt you to spend a July weekend in Cardiff, here’s some news that might swing it: Matt Mullenweg, basically ‘Mr WordPress’, is coming too.

    I’m also proud to confirm that, although we haven’t finalised the details yet, Puffbox will again be sponsoring the event… and for the very same reasons as I described last year. Many good contacts were made in Birmingham: in my own case, some of this year’s more exciting and ambitious projects simply wouldn’t have happened, had I not met certain people last July. I’m better at what I do, as a direct result, and the company proposition is  lot stronger too. It’s a chance to say thank you… and to make sure that the event definitely happens, for my own potential benefit… and others’ too.

    I’ll almost certainly be leading a session on the progress of WordPress in central government: I’ve got one or two interesting projects to talk about, and I’m sure I’ll touch on these, but it’s probably more interesting for more people if I give a cross-government overview. And I think I might have volunteered to take the opening ‘icebreaker’ session.

    Tickets for the event are £25 until the end of May – and with Matt Mullenweg confirmed as attending, it might be wise to snap yours up swiftly. For those who want to give a little something back to the community, there’s also a ‘microsponsor’ option where you can choose to pay nearly three times face value, to attend exactly the same event. (It’s proving quite a popular option, for the record.)

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    WordPress co-founder's e-government work

    So many new websites appearing at the moment, you’d think it was the end of the financial year or something. The new DIUS site is very pretty, although I hear it wasn’t cheap. There’s a new site for the Ministry of Justice, which (if I’m totally honest) feels a bit dated, and clearly has several rough edges still to be smoothed. The new Parliament site looks really fresh and welcoming, putting its WordPress-powered news function front and centre… although when it comes to Hansard, probably its primary raison d’etre, it still can’t come close to TheyWorkForYou. I’m not particularly fond of the new Civil Service site overall, but it’s good to see them trying some new things.

    But one launch you may well have missed amongst all these big splashes is the Law Commission’s consultation site. It doesn’t look much, but it’s notable because:

    • it’s been done on WordPress, slotted seamlessly into a site which more typically relies on PDF files (!).
    • it also includes a discussion forum running on WordPress’s sister project, bbPress; not as common as you might think. And
    • it’s the work of Mike Little – the WordPress founder who isn’t Matt Mullenweg.

    Having met him at last year’s WordCamp, I introduced Mike to a few government people last year, and I know he’s been doing a few WordPress jobs with Whitehall clients – but this is the first one (I think?) where he’s gone on record to take his credit. So I can finally say how fantastic it is to have him on the team, as it were, further adding to the credibility of WordPress in the government space… and I’m hoping we can find a few opportunities to work together.

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    Our new site for Social Care green paper

    CSI homepage

    Puffbox’s latest project in the health sector is Care Support Independence, a WordPress-based website in support of the forthcoming green paper on funding and delivering social care. Sadly though, I can’t present it as another victory for WordPress, as it’s a rebuild of a site that already ran on WP.

    The original CareAndSupport website was launched last summer; but truth be told, it had fallen off the rails a bit since. I was asked to rework the site, following the very successful model of the Our NHS Our Future site built for Lord Darzi’s NHS review – and, perhaps crucially, giving hands-on control to the team’s experienced in-house writer.

    At least to begin with, we’ve consciously kept the design very close to what went before: bold blocks of colour, rounded corners, fairly plain text on a white background. This should make people feel more comfortable in the transition from old site to new; and it has allowed us to concentrate on the mechanics of the move. The new WordPress theme – built from scratch, as usual – is a wonder of minimalism, with all pages (bar the homepage) being rendered using the same index.php template: it should make it much easier to step up a gear when the green paper is published.

    It’s the first time I’ve built pages using Yahoo’s YUI Grids CSS – and it certainly won’t be the last. It made laying out the page as easy, and as reliable cross-browser, as old-skool table markup. Have a play with this excellent ajax-powered grid builder to see how it all works; if you like it, I highly recommend this one-page cheat sheet. It’s a pretty good story in terms of HTML validation, too: the only error picked up by the W3C validator is the use of aria-required in the default WordPress comment template.

    Having moved the site successfully, we can start thinking more ambitiously about future functionality, design and content. There’s a clue as to the direction of our thinking in the link to the team’s Facebook group.

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    Flying the nest

    new governance

    As I’ve written before, one of the (many) selling points of WordPress is the lack of lock-in. When the time comes for a client to take greater control of a project, or if they simply feel it’s time for a change, they aren’t stuck with all their content locked in a proprietary CMS. They’re free to export their content, and take it elsewhere – to a new WordPress expert, to a new theme, to a whole new existence.

    And in a further sign of the maturity of WordPress in the marketplace, I’ll be waving goodbye to a couple of my earliest WordPress projects; I’ll also be bringing in a couple of new ones from other people.

    Governance of Britain has been tweaked by someone many of you will know – but since he/she hasn’t mentioned the work publicly yet, I won’t name names. It’s been rebranded as People, Power and Politics, and features a much more web-friendly design, and the sort of ‘web 2.0’ integration that simply wasn’t practical, or even possible when the site was first built 18 months ago. I really like what’s been done with it, in a remarkably short space of time – and I wish it well. For various reasons – some practical, some political – the site didn’t really work out as we hoped. I’m hoping the new manager, located closer to the heart of things, can take it further than I could.

    There are also moves to breathe new life into the Our NHS, Our Future website, mothballed since the publication of last summer’s big NHS review; again, it’ll be an internal team taking greater ownership of things. It looks like the site will be more ambitious in some ways, less so in others, and with a different, more internal-NHS focus than last time. I’ve been helping the new team with the various technicalities and practicalities; launch is a little way away, but the early signs are encouraging.

    Part of me is naturally sad to see them go; but since the Puffbox cause has been to encourage government to make more use of tools like WordPress, I have to put it down as a Mission Accomplished: my work there is done. And to be perfectly honest, it’s quite a relief to free up some space – albeit temporarily! – in my diary. I’ve had more offers of work lately than I could ever fulfil; and I’ve got three major projects on the go just now, which take us well beyond the straightforward ‘WordPress as CMS’ notion. I can’t wait to tell you about them.

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    A couple of Commentariat launches

    Low Carbon Commentariat

    A key element of the (re)statement of UK government open source policy the other week was the need to ’embed an open source culture of sharing, re–use and collaborative development’. That may have seemed like a waste of ink/bandwidth to those outside government; but I can assure you, I’ve sat in too many wheel reinvention seminars in my life already.

    So Puffbox is glad to do its bit to get the wheels turning, by building and launching a couple of commentable documents using Steph Gray HM Government’s Commentariat WordPress theme, as seen on the (draft) Power Of Information Taskforce report. One is for DFID, on the elimination of world poverty; the other for Neil Williams at BERR, on the Low Carbon Economy. Wow, weighty subjects or what? – WordPress saving the world?!

    Both are instantly recognisable as variations on Steph’s basic theme, give or take a bit of branding. This was a deliberate choice: I felt it was important for the sites’ origins to be immediately evident, as they needed to send a clear message about re-use, and the benefits in terms of speed and cost.

    The DFID site was just another WordPress installation in an existing environment – the same one we’re using for DFID Bloggers, as it happens; the total cost to them will be one day of my time, covering WP setup and tweaks to the theme. And when you look at the functionality they’re getting for just a few hundred quid, it’s a pretty good deal.

    The BERR project was slightly trickier. It was a new WPMU environment, always a little trickier to set up; and because the document wasn’t as long as other Commentariat instances have been, I had to re-engineer the theme to work off pages rather than categorised posts. I finished my bit in the final hours before dashing off on a week’s holiday; seeing the finished product on my return, I’m really impressed by how well it’s come together. Massive credit to Neil and the BERR team; the use of pictures really makes a dramatic difference.